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I have no inherent problem with full cross-gender options for players' appearance, provided the person that's making the convention-breaking costume is willing to accept the consequences of that choice.
However, as Lothic has repeatedly pointed out, there still are cultural conventions, and along with the resource prioritizing, there's marketing and litigation issues with bullying and harassment due to GIFT. MWM is trying to make a successful product, and they may need to compromise the purity of some ideals to achieve that end. Societal perception and traditions is a huge part of that, for better or worse.

You can either please all parties some of the time, or some parties all of the time. If cross-dressing is fully integrated into CoT, social conservatives won't pick up the game. If cross-dressing is disallowed, social liberals won't pick up the game. A restrictive access to opposite-sex clothing options may be a fair compromise, but the only reason I could possibly imagine full-blown transvestites scampering around Titan City ever working would be if the opposite-sex clothing options could be customized to look like they belong to the hero's designated sex. (ex. a dress patterned to look like wizard robes, makeup stylized to look like a cliche anime character, or long flowing hair customized to look like He-Man's)

I have no inherent problem with full cross-gender options for players' appearance, provided the person that's making the convention-breaking costume is willing to accept the consequences of that choice.
However, as Lothic has repeatedly pointed out, there still are cultural conventions, and along with the resource prioritizing, there's marketing and litigation issues with bullying and harassment due to GIFT. MWM is trying to make a successful product, and they may need to compromise the purity of some ideals to achieve that end. Societal perception and traditions is a huge part of that, for better or worse.

The "She asked for it" argument? What consequence should a transvestite character/player be subject to that others are not?

This whole post is a no.

And my bear friends are some of the most hardcore geeks I know. I don't practice the politics of exclusion. Gay Lesbian Bi and Trans geeks deserve to game free of harassment just as much as their Cisgendered Heterosexual counterparts.

And my bear friends are some of the most hardcore geeks I know. I don't practice the politics of exclusion. Gay Lesbian Bi and Trans geeks deserve to game free of harassment just as much as their Cisgendered Heterosexual counterparts.

Players harassing other players based on any kind of LGBT reasoning is absolutely not acceptable and I fully expect the Devs of CoT to do everything in their power to prevent/mitigate it at every opportunity.

But if the Devs decide (for whatever reason) to not allow (for example) the male character model to wear a bra or a beehive hairdo I will not automatically assume they're actively persecuting or discriminating against players for any kind of LGBT reasons in the slightest and anyone who reflexively jumps to that kind of ill-informed accusation will be deemed ridiculous in the extreme. Just because "every costume item should be available to every character model" is a worthy ideal doesn't obligate the Devs to meet that goal in the slightest. If they manage it, great. If they don't, better luck next time.

For what it's worth I will once again predict that the Devs of CoT will come as close to the "all options for all models" ideal as they possibly can and it'll likely be closer than any game before has ever come to 100% option equality. I'm simply not looking forward to people like you hypocritically playing the "discrimination" card in a game where you're likely going to get as much freedom as you've ever had short of Second Life.

Just as long as we can avoid the visually disturbing outfits, I'd be fine with all costumes for all.

What's visually disturbing? Super hairy fat man in a tiny bikini. Women whose body shape would make an anime artist shake his head in shame (Read: VERY skinny body, giant breasts and hips). Pretty much the most tame examples I can think of, but you get the gist.

As a man whose hair has grown almost to the backs of his knees, I absolutely support this. I'm always disappointed when I see the long hair options for male characters in games - Always. Making hairstyles unisex, I believe, would rectify this issue. They have already posted some very cool hairstyles here, which I would personally enjoy seeing used in this manner.

As a man whose hair has grown almost to the backs of his knees, I absolutely support this. I'm always disappointed when I see the long hair options for male characters in games - Always. Making hairstyles unisex, I believe, would rectify this issue. They have already posted some very cool hairstyles here, which I would personally enjoy seeing used in this manner.

For what it's worth I will once again predict that the Devs of CoT will come as close to the "all options for all models" ideal as they possibly can and it'll likely be closer than any game before has ever come to 100% option equality. I'm simply not looking forward to people like you hypocritically playing the "discrimination" card in a game where you're likely going to get as much freedom as you've ever had short of Second Life.

One of the nice things about starting from scratch is that certain things (for example, the character mesh topology) are not subject to the vagaries of "what the hell were you thinking back then?" (or at least, not nearly so much). So, for example, the target is to have the same skeletal structure (so that animations can be shared) but different body proportions — not just gender-based, but also slider-based (think 'wide shoulders', etc.)

It also happens to mean that when you're working on something where sexual dimorphism matters (almost all of which is in a small handful of areas) you can get a decent start at supporting a second (… third, fourth, fifth…) mesh by simply copying across what you have — since almost *all* clothing where it matters tends to conform to the skin, it means that the same logic that decides where the skin is in relation to the bones can be used to drive the clothing as well. By no means perfect, but more of a "tailor it to fit properly" situation than a "start from scratch" one. In fact, "tailoring" it may not even be metaphor in a lot of cases.

As for hair? Both the planned interim approach (current 'best common practice') and the approach we hope to use once it becomes available (currently in the "vendor demo reel" phase) support flexible hair. I strongly suspect that one of the big reasons hair differentiated was that the skull shapes differed, meaning that each hairpiece would need to have (at least) two copies, both manually fitted. When the cost is that high, it isn't difficult for the ROI on providing it for a relatively limited use case to simply not be sufficient to drive a business case.

However, when the hair is either flexible (so that it can rearrange itself to lay against the skull mesh) or can be set up to reshape itself with the skull, this more or less becomes a non-issue. Which is no small part of why we're aiming that direction. In much the same way that clothing can be made a great deal more flexible at much lower cost if you can get it to "within a centimeter or so" and then let physics handle the rest, compared to needing to do a perfect fit that has to deform in *exactly* the same way as the body under it or risk clipping horribly.

*inserts 2 coins*
Just as long as we can avoid the visually disturbing outfits, I'd be fine with all costumes for all.
What's visually disturbing? Super hairy fat man in a tiny bikini. Women whose body shape would make an anime artist shake his head in shame (Read: VERY skinny body, giant breasts and hips). Pretty much the most tame examples I can think of, but you get the gist.

Disclaimer: this post is not setting policy or speaking for the game as a whole in any official capacity.

Best advice I can offer here is "don't look." While we are working on ways to address things such as flashing or high-movement animations (e.g. the fire/spines scrapper that someone I know refused to team with because it made her feel ill within a few moments, even though almost nothing else in the game did), there simply isn't any sane technical measure that can restrict costumes from "looking bad". CoH tried it, and failed. CO tried it and failed.

My take on it is simple: as long as the costume creator makes it easy to have a *good* costume, the vast majority of characters on at any given time are liable to be in good costumes because if they didn't care about "looking good" (in a group psychology sense) the costume creator wouldn't be the huge draw that it is. When that is true, it makes it obvious that the bad costumes are either someone who does not understand that it looks bad, or someone who is doing so deliberately. The visual presentation is a part of how they present the character, just as anything they say in-world is. And reactions to it should be handled the same way: barring actively problematic outfits (i.e. copyright violations, being used for harassment, and so on) their right to look how they want to trumps your right to have only the things you want to see in the world.

Where we reasonably can, we will do our best to not make that a zero-sum game. How much, if anything, we can manage beyond the things required for actual gameplay issues (as in, 'cannot play the game due to visuals'), is pretty much completely up in the air and not really likely to come down from there for quite a while yet.

Proof that inclusive gaming is wanted, needed, and rewarding.
P.S. - Yes I had some personal work put into this as have my friends at gaygamer.net as we have for GaymerX 1 and 2
P.P.S. - Thanks Blizzard

It would seem most big names are oriented towards that idea, these days... On grounds of popular opinion being the end-all and be-all of the entertainment industry, you are correct. Besides, inclusiveness allows for easier targeting identification. I can deal with that.

Lord Nightmare wrote:
Super hairy fat man in a tiny bikini.
Yet you can have that same man in boxers, swimtrunks, or briefs without an issue if those pieces are in the game without any gender issues as well - and that really isn't that different.

There's a big difference between games like CoT providing for the capability to create potentially "questionable" costumes and whether or not a player chooses to make use of that capability. Frankly I'd rather risk seeing the occasional "super hairy fat man in a tiny bikini" running around if it means that the game would actually allow you to have "hairy men", "fat men" and/or "tiny bikinis" as possible options that could be used in more generalized ways.

It's not really up to MWM to pre-censor costume options that are merely subjectively bad. If a player manages to come up with a costume that is truly, unquestionably offensive or acts in a way that is clearly trying to provoke others around them via trolling/griefing with their costume then obviously I'd have no problem with the GMs handling it on a case-by-case basis. But I don't think we should be denied options just on the "fear" that sometimes those options could be used in tasteless ways.

Now (once again) if there are unavoidable technical or engineering reasons why men in CoT aren't allowed to wear tiny bikinis then that would be a perfectly understandable situation that would have nothing to do with "censorship" or "LGBT discrimination". But if there are no legitimate objective excuses like that then they should get the choice regardless if it "looks good" or not.

I have no inherent problem with full cross-gender options for players' appearance, provided the person that's making the convention-breaking costume is willing to accept the consequences of that choice.

What consequences should they have to accept? They should no more have to "accept" the consequences of the choice than someone who plays a minority or a female hero or for that matter, an old gun totin' white guy.

While I'm willing to grant we should all accept that not everyone is going to appreciate our style, I think it's unfair that any group should have to "accept" harassment of any kind.

Are you just saying they should realize it might happen? That's probably true- then when it happens they should be quick to report it. And the friends of the person doing the harassment should be the first ones to shame them for that behavior.

That isn't the same as "accepting," though and I think we need to make the difference clear.

Dear Lothic:

Quote:

But I don't think we should be denied options just on the "fear" that sometimes those options could be used in tasteless ways.

there simply isn't any sane technical measure that can restrict costumes from "looking bad". CoH tried it, and failed. CO tried it and failed.

No matter what you do, there's always going to be a subset (or even a superset) of really crummy combinations. It's kind of like music, in that sense. Not every piece of music is going to "use" every note that an instrument can produce ... but it's still important that every instrument produce all of the notes that it can. Of the combination of notes that can be played on an instrument, or a set of instruments, only a small subset of those combinations will be "pleasing" to the ear ... but it's still important to have all of those combinations be potentially available, even if most people wouldn't want to hear them.

The talent and, let's be honest here, good taste and judgement that it takes to make a good looking costume for your avatar is a measure of skill, knowledge and the available combinations. If you want to have a lot of really good costume combinations be available, then you're just going to have to accept that there's going be a whole lot of really BAD costume combinations available too. The best way to deal with Bad/Ugly/Offensive Costumes is not by using "rules" in the costume editor that prevent certain combinations from occurring, but rather by coding an easy to use Social Feature that allows Players to report Bad Costumes in a way that can be investigated and adjudicated by customer support staff quickly and easily.

So the answer to the problem isn't to code limitations into the game itself, but rather to let the community decide for themselves what is in good/poor taste and then communicate that to support staff on a case by case basis. That way you actually weed out the offenders without restricting the inspirational.

And then there Arbiter Fabulous ... ^_~

—

Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.

The talent and, let's be honest here, good taste and judgement that it takes to make a good looking costume for your avatar is a measure of skill, knowledge and the available combinations. If you want to have a lot of really good costume combinations be available, then you're just going to have to accept that there's going be a whole lot of really BAD costume combinations available too. The best way to deal with Bad/Ugly/Offensive Costumes is not by using "rules" in the costume editor that prevent certain combinations from occurring, but rather by coding an easy to use Social Feature that allows Players to report Bad Costumes in a way that can be investigated and adjudicated by customer support staff quickly and easily.

To be fair, you don't deal with bad or ugly costumes at all. Offensive ones, or copyright violating ones, yes you report. But if it is ugly it's really none of your business and a waste of GM time dealing with the report. The only time you should be judging a player on their costume is in a costume contest you are running, and even then, you just award the winner, no need to even tell the player their costume sucks.

—

-----------------------------------------
I never set anything on fire accidentally!

I never got to play APB, but I distinctly remember getting excited about it (and I rarely get excited about anything) when I saw the demo posted by Rock, Paper, Shotgun showing the range of customization for hair and body art. I remember hoping that would become the new standard in character creation for MMOs. Sadly, the game failed for reasons having little to do with its customization, and unfortunately, from what I'm reading it looks like it is already too late to hope that the COT crew will be leaning in that direction rather than merely trying to make a better version of the old style of CoH/CO creator. How I wish this was not the case. As it is going though, I would like to ask that Hair gets its own three sliders rather than just being tacked on to the head and maybe being affected by brow and skull sliders.

Regarding bras: In CoH, I distinctly remember wishing that some of the women's chest overlays were available for male/huge because it seemed as if male/huge included belly coverage that female didn't. Guys got sensible armor coverage, and gals got fashion. While I'm a fan of sensible armor coverage for all sexes in many cases (looking at you, bare midriff mando girls and femtroopers), I'm a bit more flexible with the need for style for super heroes (if you're already bulletproof, armor is just a fashion accessory) and some of my guys could have used more revealing pectoral armor.

Regarding beehives: Why would a guy wear a beehive hairdo? Ask Billy Beeman, who can communicate with bees and wasps, and keeps a swarm of them handy ever since being blessed by the Hive Queen, a divine beeing who chose Billy to bee her warrior mate. (Oh my God! They're in my hair! They're in my hair! :read with a sense of ecstasy rather than horror:) Of course the important question there is whether the Beehive Hair will bee accompanied by a swarm aura tied to a PBAOE poison DOT toggle.

I definitely agree with this. I love long hair on my male characters as I do like wear my hair long in the real world and I just find myself constantly disappointed with the amount of MMOs nowadays that thinks long hair equates to barely shoulder length for guys. There is plenty of room on both genders for nice hairstyles of all different lengths. Another thing that annoys me is how the games that do allow long hair will for some reason or another hide it completely if you so much as equip on a cheap leather helmet that barely covers your head.